playing at a popular bar in colchester every saturday night gives me a bit of an insight into people’s music tastes, the music policy is fairly commercial and as a consequence i get a quite a few requests for people’s favourite tracks along with some rather odd requests. it’s house music all night long and so we get large amount of requests for r&b and hip hop - but if you remove those this is what i have to deal with…

“you’re not a real dj are you!” well, i don’t know what i’ve been doing for the past 10 years or so. this one didn’t even start with a request - just a comment of “do you play this stuff all night, ’cause it all sounds the sound” and ended up with a life story of a alcohol influenced, self confessed lover and collector of music.

“anything in spanish” talk about specific, and of course 10 minutes after the group of requesters left i thought of a track that i had with me!

“anything from manchester” ok, so I know about the madchester / manchester scene, stone roses, happy mondays, the hacienda etc, but asking for it like that is a little specific and just calling out for a sarcastic answer. the girl later came back and bugged me to play ‘higher state of consciousness’ which is from Philadelphia, so manchester wasn’t too important then.

“let me mc, give me a mic” er, no. we didn’t even have a mic so she just mc’ed at me for ages - for about 5 or more minutes at a time. i also had the cv thrown at me, “yeah i’ve performed at the hacienda” - that’s great, but i don’t need a life story. later she wanted to follow me to an after party - although i was only going home - when i turned her down, she told me to f&@k off.

i’ve started to take my website design more seriously and brought my portfolio website bang up to date with a more business like approach to my freelancing. previously it was a bit more casual in it’s content and copy, i also didn’t do too much in the way of promoting the site - there wasn’t even any meta tags or a sitemap submission to google to my eternal shame!

so i’ve updated, pruned and rewritten everything on the site. i’m also going to invest in a little advertising, both locally in the free newspaper and with google adwords. it should be a nice experiment as the one thing i did do correctly with the site as to add google analytics so i can track the before and after statistics.

here’s the link: www.martinlucas.co.uk

along with my own site i’m trying to organise my online brand, the avatar you see on the right is a cartoon version of me, complete with headphones - this appears on my facebook, my twitter, msn instant messenger and all the forums that i contribute to, so hopefully you might see him popping up around the world wide web and know that it’s me.

I was ripping a few mix cd’s for my ipod yesterday and i put a disc in the drive and it didn’t show up in itunes, or in finder - very strange…

so i restarted and nothing changed, i held down the eject key on the keyboard and still nothing happened. this was when i panicked a little and hit the Apple Discussions forum to find out if this had happened to anyone else.

there were a few similar scenarios but nothing exactly the same, but the solution was found. basically you have to restart and hold down the touch pad button until the cd ejects - and it did.

here’s the support page with all the info: docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=88068

a short while ago i was contacted by a nice chap called scott, and he asked me if he could use one of my photographs [this one] on a dvd case for a new film that was about to be released.

he didn’t give me any information, apart from the fact there was no budget to pay to use the photo - my thinking at the time was some money would of been nice, but having my photo on the case was pretty cool, so i didn’t grumble and i let them use the photograph in question.

that was 2 months ago, and last week scott contacted me again and this time he sent through the final design for the case. it’s not the best design that i’ve ever seen - but, my photo is on the back and as it turns out the film stars ice t and gary busey - people who i’ve actually heard of - so that’s pretty cool.

here’s the layout.

the funny thing is that the photograph was taken using a 1.3 mega pixel camera phone, not exactly state of the art photography equipment.

…or not quite, we’re are always on there - but we are never on very early in the program and this gets me down, i’ve noticed this over the last few seasons where we’ve progressively finished higher in the league but we are not getting the coverage. i even emailed the bbc asking why we are not on earlier and therefore not having longer highlights.

so i’ve decided to keep track of where we are in the program, i have missed the first 3 games of the season (wigan at home, tottenham away and reading away) but hopefully the remaining 35 games of the season will tell the tale of everton’s misfortune with the good ol’ beeb or it may just serve to prove me wrong!

I’ll continue to update the table throughout the season to keep a tabs on everton’s performance on match of the day!

22nd of October 2007 Update: Well I can’t believe the BBC put us on 3rd for the Mersyside Derby - which was a game full of talking points and action - which is how the BBC ranks the order of games. We were robbed today, the referee basically cost us at least a point, if not all 3.

2nd of December 2007 Update: I missed MOTD last week for our 7 - 1 thrashing of Sunderland, I caught a copy of it on YouTube which was only a 3 minute video - so I don’t think we were on too early. I’m going to contact the BBC to find out where we were featured in the programme.

3rd of February 2008 Update: I think I may have ballsed this one up - you see, I’ve been keeping track of how far from the first game we are placed in MOTD, but what if there was only 6 games and we were 5th - which is 2nd from last, but if there were 10 games and we were 5, that’s nearer the beginning rather than the end! So I will continue it, but next season I go work things backwards, and try to keep up with the show better! We’ve also been playing in Europe and cups more than usual so we’re playing on Sunday’s more often and therefore we’re not even on MOTD as often as usual!

I recently switched things around at work in regards to our email system. I was originally receiving all our work emails on my powerbook as well as all my personal and work related emails. which meant i always seemed to have a large amount of emails in my inbox, so i moved all the emails to do with the day job to a computer at work which has dramatically freed up my emails on my laptop. This also meant that i had to set up a new email address for my freelance work contacts - i was always using my work email for this.

so the problem now was what to put before the @martinlucas.co.uk for an email address. the obvious is my name, i.e. martin@martinlucas.co.uk which a lot of people do, but it’s something that i don’t like because of the repetition and i didn’t want the boring and predictable;

info@
contact@
mail@
email@

so i had a look around at work other ‘cool’ companies out there had. i know that i had seen websites with something different before the @ before - but purposefully looking for those wasn’t easy.

one of the more popular things to put before the @ was a greeting of some sorts, hello@ was found at a number of sites and i think this works really well - it’s casual, inviting and drops the rather stuffy and tired info@. but it still wasn’t quite right for me, as i wanted the email address to be (at least almost) grammatically correct, so you could actually say out the email address and it would make sense.

this limits the choices somewhat to verbs that came be done at a person or a place. here’s a couple that i came up with;

wink@ - way too flirtacious, but pretty fun
shout@ - would be great if it was for my dj site
sayhello@ - what i ended up going for

so i went with ’say hello at martin lucas dot co dot uk’, i think it works quite well. it asks people to contact me at my domain name, it’s an email address and a direction - it’s also quite casual without being too familiar and possibly off putting to potential clients and customers.

it’s nothing special in terms of technique or even the product it advertises - just a credit card, but the music (’Non Stop’ by Whitey available at iTunes) and especially the storyline makes for the 60 seconds that it is squeezed into is really impressive… well, i thought so.

Just hit Google to do a search this morning and it’s gone dark - not undercover in a Jack Bauer kind of way - but to get across the message that turning your lights off when you don’t need them helps saves the World’s energy supply. A group called Earth Hour is asking everyone across the World to turn off their lights for 1 hour between 8:00 and 9:00pm this evening as a little demonstration slash experiment.

Find out more here; www.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/earthhour/.

The BBC are great, i think they provide a fantastic service for our 120 odd pounds each year - television, radio and the excellent website. I have noticed over the years that the music they use for their television programmes is very similar to the collection of tracks that I have on my iPod, which is great - it’s always nice to hear a piece of your favourite music in an episode of Top Gear, on the Goal of the Month on Match of the Day or even on Gardeners World - not that I watch it, I channel hoped one evening and heard ‘Cotton Wool’ by Lamb.

So, what are the tracks then, from what albums and by which producers. Here’s a list of albums that seem to provide the BBC with hours of music for their productions.

Lamb - Lamb
Lamb’s self titled debut contains my favourite track of all time ‘Gorecki’.

DJ Shadow - The Private Press
I could of chosen Shadow’s album ‘Endroducing…’ - which helped define the genre of Trip Hop; Shadow coined the actual phrase - but ‘The Private Press’ just about features more often on tv than the acclaimed debut.

UNKLE - Never Never Land & War Stories
From ambient soundtrack bootlegs, club tracks with heavy breakbeats and guitar lead songs featuring vocals by artists such as Ian Brown - Unkle’s last 2 albums are well suited to pretty much whatever musical style a production company might need.

Royksopp - Melody AM
It’s an obvious one - but still none the less it does appear on a lot of programs and this is an album that’s a few years old now and not Royksopp’s only album too.

craig armstrong - the space between us & as if to nothing
the space between us is a collection of tracks that have featured in films such as baz luhman’s romeo + juliet. as if to nothing is a proper artist album, both feature dramatic strings, heartfelt pianos and the occasional electronic beat.

massive attack - mezzanine
the whole album is a dark brooding soundscape that perfectly sits under a whole host of visuals and one track stands out more than the other ten and that is ‘angel’.

I’ve been audio scrobbling for a while now and although it just sits in the background noting down all the music I play in itunes which often means i forget all about it and don’t do anything with the information - it is interesting to stop by the lastfm site and get my listening statistics and some recommendations of new and untried music - which is what it is really good at.

Now lastfm have stepped up to the plate and are offering full tracks on request in addition to their ‘random’ radio player. You’ll be able to listen to a track on demand 3 times before being directed to buy it from an online download store. It’s definitely a different look into distributing music and they are banking on people not being worried about not actually owning the music that they are playing.

More here; www.last.fm.