I also would say that a lot of the work on Flickr is generic. It looks quite modern, because you lot are aware of trends and the language of contemporary photography… But I cannot recall seeing a set of work that would make a stunning book.
Before you all bite my head off and tell me that you are all geniuses, you have to remember that there are over 1000 books of new work published every year and most of these tend to disappear after publication.The quality of this published work is high, but it is difficult to achieve the uniqueness that will assure you of a place in photo history.
It is a tough world out there, and I think that Flickr has a great contribution to make, but still feel it is unlikely that the next big photo star will come from this source.

So that means that I’m now too old for Radio 2. What the hell happened there?!

When the new 16GB iPod Nanos came out, I knew I had to have one: no moving parts and more than 3 times as much storage as my original brick. I know the Classic is better value per GB but I only have about 9GB of MP3s, so I figured the Nano would do.

I had feared that it wouldn’t work with my PowerBook - but hell it even works with my G4 iMac. V e r y s l o w l y. How I miss Firewire… an album would zip across that thick cable in seconds. It’s like missing Concorde - in the good old days it was all so much quicker.

All my music is on the big fat G4 iMac - which only has USB 1.0 - and so I ended up having to leave it running all night to transfer some 3000 songs. So imagine my amusement today when I started putting some videos on the Nano (MPEG Streamclip is the tool you need for making iPod-friendly videos, by the way), I pressed ‘Sync movies’ - I said movies - and it deleted all my music in a second. All gone. Hours of transfer work zapped. So I’m transferring it all again, and I can’t even play the addictive tilt-operated Maze game while it does it…

And I’ve rediscovered a lost gem in my CD collection (thank you Smilja wherever you are) - Are You Okay? by Was (Not Was). It’s from 1990! It still sounds great! It has an up-tempo song that’s actually about domestic murder! It has Leonard Cohen singing about Elvis’s Rolls Royce! It has a song - oddly not heard on the radio much since 9/11 - called ‘I Blew Up The United States’! And I feel better than James Brown! I feel better now. How do you feel?

And this cheered me up just now: quotes from the Steve Martin film LA Story.

For example:

Harris: Hello, this is Harris. I’m in right now, so you can talk to me personally. Please start talking at the sound of the beep.
[BEEP]
Sara: Hello?
Harris: Hello.
Sara: Hello?
Harris: Hello.
Sara: Is this a person?
Harris: Yes, it is a person.

Hope they kept the receipt.

I can’t bear listening to the man, but David Hepworth confirms the nation’s suspicion that BBC 6Music presenter George Lamb is a tosser, he knows or cares bugger all about music which is a bit of a failing when you’re on a station that claims to take music seriously.

A few months ago I had the misfortune to hear his interview with Martha Wainwright - he was clearly less interested in the music than in chatting her up. I assume he’d only agreed to speak to her on the strength of the cover photograph of the amusingly-titled I Know You’re Married But I’ve Got Feelings Too.

By the way, worth scrolling to the top of that Word magazine page to hear the cringeworthy BBC WM interview - thanks Westy!

Turns out the solution was rather simpler than all the mucking around I’d been doing deleting com.apple.airport files and the like.

I just made a new ‘location’ - its location had been on ‘automatic’, so I went to System Preferences > Network and clicked on the locations drop-down menu and made a new location (called ‘foo’ of course). Since then it’s been rejoining my wireless network ok when it wakes up. Phew! Or should I say ‘Foo!’?

Home alone and at a loose end, I Googled ‘cool things to do with a Nintendo Wii’ (it’s been sitting in the living room not earning its keep) and discovered Wii Transfer. This allows me to stream iPhoto pictures and iTunes songs from the big fat old 320GB iMac in the back room which has all my MP3s on it. I had to shell out £7 for some Wii Points to download the Wii web-browser, but now here I am with a big stupid grin on my face dancing round the living room to the strains of That Petrol Emotion. Doesn’t seem to like long songs, though - the Wii says it doesn’t have enough memory and chokes. So we are spared The Orb’s ‘Little Fluffy Clouds‘ for now…