This is a short update from last month’s post about my relationship with photography. I’ve mellowed out somewhat. I’ve read some stuff. And I’ve learned a bunch of things.

The first book I picked out from my rather sizeable to-read pile was Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson. In short, I really enjoyed it. It’s pretty heavy on the photos (as you would expect), but the text is easy to get into which makes up for it. Bryan’s writing style is very conversational and personal, which took me a little while to get used to, but that’s just me being me.

There’s a more recent pressing – 3rd edition of Understanding Exposure – which no doubt has updates for more recent technology, but I rather liked the edition I had. I’m less interested in the modernity of photography gizmos and more keen on composition and grasping the basics of manual control.

The biggest change since I read the book? I shoot manual. I’m still no better at it, but I’m learning to spot my mistakes and understand why I suck, and I’m working on sucking less.

(A bit of a brain dump follows, it’s a bit scatter-brained but I’m sure you’ll cope)

No floor plans for today, I’ve gone far enough with them for now. In fact, I’m taking a week off from house things for sanity reasons. Everything came to a head last night (Sunday) and I’m feeling rather flat today. Something good did come out of last night’s brouhaha, though. A moment of clarity. Where I need to focus.

The thing is, I’m obsessing over this house thing. I loathe living in our current house, and it makes me desperately unhappy, something I’m very used to and – sadly – have just accepted as being the norm. The future holds a new house and new life elsewhere, something that can’t come soon enough. In order to get to that future, we need to be in the right frame of mind and have enough money to make it happen. Currently, we don’t have either, so we’re stuck here for a while.

I don’t like it here, and Cooper Acres is my escapism. I hadn’t realised it before yesterday, but it’s a dream. Rather, it’s a dream that, if I don’t control it, will become an obsession. It will happen, it’s not purely a pipe dream, but it needs to fit into my life to such an extent that I don’t become blinded and other things suffer as a result.

I have no real love for the past or ancient history, and I tend not to dwell on personal experiences that have already happened. Insert your cliché of choice here, what’s done is done and I can’t turn the clock back. With my apparent ambivalence about the past, I like to think I’m a forward-looking and/or progressive person. I care more about stuff that’s going to happen than stuff that’s already happened, broadly speaking.

But here’s the rub: I can’t influence the future. The future hasn’t happened yet and the future I’m thinking of is years away. And I can’t influence years away. I can, however, influence now. I haven’t given much thought to the present – not for any sinister reasons or wanting to procrastinate, it just didn’t enter my mind as being important. But it is. I was wrong.

Concentrating on the things happening now will directly or indirectly affect our future, and when this future comes around, it’ll be the present. Which I can influence. Keeping my mind in the present and not worrying about the future will help things around here, which will make us happier & more productive, which will make us Oprah-rich in a shorter timeframe, which will allow us to move house. It’s all connected.

With that in mind, this week is all about making the current situation better now, and not in x months or years time. No plans, no wiggling around with boxes and sharp intakes of breath when I see build costs, no getting freaked out by the sheer enormity of what’s going on, just solid stuff to get back on track and – dare I say it – get my life together.

Baby steps, right?

I have a very love-hate relationship with photography. The amount of time and money spent on what is essentially a hobby is high compared to the satisfaction I get from the output and results. I look forward to the ritual of preparing and packing all the gear, and travelling to places to take photos – and there are fleeting moments when I find something sufficiently interesting to photograph in a marginally interesting or engaging way. It all falls flat when I look at the results.

Having thought about this for a few weeks, I’ve come to some conclusions:

• Everything I shoot is awful. I’m my own worst critic.
• There’s no point in forcing something that isn’t meant to be.
• I still occasionally lust after fast glass. And I like this.
• I don’t need the latest and greatest for my budget.
• I need to read more. Actually, I need to just start reading.
• I need to learn. And I want to learn.

I started to develop an interest in photography in about 2006 and took an evening course at the local college. The course itself was badly-written, badly-led and could have been done in a third of the time far more effectively. A 36 week course starting in September meant many dark evenings – not the most inspiring time to take photos and learn about light, etc.

I own a Canon 30D digital SLR from 2006. If I knew how to get the most out of it, I think it’d be the perfect camera for me. I occasionally get sneery comments from people with smaller cameras, higher pixel counts & in-camera features that make life easier for them. The best photographers I know have high quality output, engaging and/or emotive motifs and don’t babble on about megapickles. They have an eye for detail and have consistently high quality shots for their chosen fields, be they portraiture, nature, candids, abstract or whatever.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t need shiny gear as a crutch for photography. For a large part of 2009 and the first half of 2010 I was lusting after a Canon 5D as a replacement for my 30D. It’s a step up in terms of technical functionality – bigger, faster, does full HD video, and other bells and whistles.

Crucially, it’s still just a camera. I’d been at the point where I had enough money to buy it and wimped out at the last moment. There’s a store down the road where I could’ve walked in, paid money and walked away with a new camera. I could’ve used my new camera with my existing lenses and had an instant upgrade to my gear.

But for what? I’d have gone from a Canon camera to another Canon camera and been 1600GBP+ worse off. Sure, it would’ve been a bit faster and shinier, create enormously large photos and made my ePenis girth a bit more substantial.

The sticking point for me and photography is the way I shoot photos. There’s a dial on most digital SLR cameras that you can twiddle to various modes. I don’t use the green square (drunk mode). I don’t use the tulip, mountain, or head mode. I used to shoot in P, now I shoot in Av. I want to shoot in Manual, but I’m not there yet.

This is how I explain the various modes, with a hopefully-appropriate analogy:

• Green box: your live-in chef cooks your food for you. It looks appealing and tastes nice. Chef responds to your moods by making decisions for you.

• Tulip/mountain/head: you know you want carrots, chef will make sure you have something with carrots in and make sure that they look like nice carrots.

• Av/Tv: you know you want carrots and do some of the cooking yourself. Chef helps for the bits you’re not sure about.

• Manual: you cook. You decide ingredients, cooking methods, which pan to use, how long to cook for, and the onus is on you to get it right. Chef lets you get on with it and watches ‘Deal or No Deal’.

Using this analogy, I sort of know how to cook (a bit) and know what I want to achieve, but I’m cooking my carrots in the wrong way. Chef is helping out, but is essentially turd polishing because I’m getting it wrong without knowing why I’m getting it wrong.

Enough of the carrot metaphor. I know the maths behind aperture and exposure, I know I don’t want to hipster-ify my shots, and I know I need to check/set my dials and settings during a photo shoot to make sure they’re correct. I want to take/make photos that I can look at and enjoy, and if other people say ‘wow’ now and again then I would consider that a bonus.

When it comes to post-processing, I trawl through pages of garbage. I hate just about everything I shoot – the composition is bad, the image quality is poor and I feel bad about the results. I feel like I’m wasting my time. All the build-up ritual and experience has been wasted, and I’ve got a card full of bad memories. I wipe it, and start again.

Truth is, I don’t need new gear. My bank balance, not to mention the Cooper Acres fund, will be far better off for it. It’s the time of year when new stuff is released; the summer is winding up, people get back to work from summer vacation, conference season kicks off, and the holiday season is coming. Photokina is coming, and Canon Expo is also coming. Expect new camera bodies, new lenses and enough megapickles to fill a cinema screen.

Credit card safely tucked away, I’m going to read more. And take more photos. And learn. And try not to be so self-critical.

I was sent three snarky emails this week, one of which is excerpted below, verbatim:

why don’t u follow me on ttwitter i follow u and have followd u for like 6 months now u hardly follow ne1. i dont know why i follow u as you are a boring (very rude c-word) and nuthing you say makes sense you make me real angry cs i dont undertand what you say and I hope u die of canser

Quite what I’d done to warrant someone hoping I die of ‘canser’ is beyond me, frankly – the rest of the email is not new territory to me, though I don’t get called a very rude c-word that often on the internet. Sanctimonious, yes. Pious, sometimes (which is rather good for an atheist). I even got called a misogynist this week, too, which is a first.

My Twitter account has something of a love/hate status in my life. Despite using it for a couple of years already, it still hasn’t found its right place in my day – or rather, I haven’t found a place for it in my day that I’m totally happy with. I’m trying, though, and making progress. This week it passed its arbitrarily large 16,000th tweet milestone, so I figured it would be a good time to share some stuff with you.

One question I do get regularly is “why don’t you follow me”, normally in a more salient form than the halfwit quoted above. Here’s the thing. I don’t follow many people. As I type this, I follow 9 (nine) accounts and inexplicably have amassed ~355 followers. I know all the people associated with the 9 accounts I follow, either In Real Life, or over the web.

There are people who follow me that I have met before (In Real Life), have worked with (at previous jobs), have laughed out loud with, have got drunk with, have slept with, would quite like to sleep with given half a chance (easy, tiger), and yet I don’t follow them back. If you think you fit into one or more of the categories above, here’s why:

I don’t subscribe to the whole Twitter numbers game BS. Yes, you may follow hundreds of people and expect me to do the same, but seriously – how many of those hundreds of people do you actually pay attention to in more than a passing sense? I know what’s going on with the people I follow, if I let in many more people to my brainspace things would suffer. I know when people are having a hard time, and I can do something about it when I know. When I don’t know, I can’t help. When my brain capacity is full of jabber about the latest international happenings, or what you had for breakfast, something else is squeezed out. Pretty simple, really. My brain works in wonderful ways sometimes, I’m still getting used to how it works after 30+ years, that’s just how it goes.

Your life is wonderful, and amazing, and cool, and so on. And you tell everyone about it. Constantly. And, dude, it gets old. Really quickly. Extra bonus points here for if your life is way better than mine and insist on yammering on, that makes me like you a little bit less. Learn when to shush.

Your life is godawful, depressing, monotonous, and so on. And you tell everyone about it. Constantly. And, guess what – that gets old, too. It gets old faster than those people with apparently perfect lives (better than mine, remember). I’m dealing with long-term mental health issues and I don’t need to hear how your job is boring and you had a cheese sandwich for lunch. I’m pleased you had a tasty sammich, don’t get me wrong, but knowing it adds precisely nothing to my day. Apart from some days persuading me to have a tasty bread-based snack, but that’s just wasted calories.

I don’t know you anymore. Maybe I knew you in the past, but – chances are – if either of us haven’t made an effort to track each other down or get in touch over the past months or years, there’s probably nothing there. There’s a reason why we don’t get together, the universe has a tendency to unfold as it should, so why force it? I don’t dislike you, I don’t hate you, I just don’t consider you one of my friends.

You have no quality control or ‘off’ switch. According to Tweetstats, the graphs for my Twitter output indicate some interesting stats: about 20 nuggets of fluff each day, every day. I do have some quality control over what goes out there. I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not perfect and some days there’s all manner of garbage. Alcohol and sleep-deprivation affect the quality and quantity of output, often for the better. Most months are fairly predictable volume-wise, however some months I go buckwild and over a thousand bits of fluff are spewed out across the interwebs:

You call yourself a social media consultant. Ha. Snake oil much?

You protect your tweets. I get it, you want to protect your output from nefarious types, your boss/family and whatnot, but unless I know you well, I’m not going to go through hoops to have you decide whether or not to let me read your stuff. This also means that you can’t @ me, your replies won’t get through to me because you protect your content. I’m not the bad man here, you’ve decided to cover your behind by protecting your content. Sure, if you’re spouting all manner of uncontrollable profanity or slander/libel, then limit who sees it, but I have a feeling most people who protect their content are fairly normal people with fairly normal lives. Does your blog have a password? Do you have PGP keys on your email? Does your Twitter output really need to be protected?

You over-sanitise everything. I mean, what, do you have PR department all of a sudden? You used to be so fun and interesting!

When I started writing this post, I said to myself I wouldn’t be judgemental. I don’t think I’ve been successful, but this is how I feel, so it must be said.

Use Twitter for whatever you like. Say whatever you like. Opt-in and opt-out as you like. Most importantly, try and understand why I’m probably not following you – and don’t feel you need to change in order to make me follow you. It’s only a BS numbers game, after all.

It has been about 5 weeks since we upgraded to iPhones, and my old contract has expired – which means my old phone is no longer required and can be recycled. Apparently there are loads of old phones kicking around in drawers and such like, and more that end up in landfill – which is a bad idea because they’re WEEE (electronic waste) and as such pretty toxic. But the good news is that they’re really recyclable, and there are lots of companies and charities out there that would like to help you recycle your old phone because they’re worth money

If your phone is working, and relatively new (and if it is, why are you upgrading????) then envirophone will give you up to £200 for it. You tell them what you’ve got, and they’ll tell you how much it’s worth and send you a pre-paid envelope to mail it in. What did they reckon my rather ancient (but still functional) Sony Ericsson T630 was worth? £0.82. It’s not worth getting out of bed for that. Or I could get £2 worth of ClubCard vouchers from Tesco, but I’m not their biggest fan.

So it looks like donating it to charity might be a better bet. The Eden Project could use it to help fund their education projects; Oxfam use them to help people in need; the Woodland Trust can apparently get a guaranteed £2.25 of tree-planting cash for each handset recycled.

Since I am a big fan of trees, I am leaning towards the Woodland Trust, unless anyone has a better suggestion?

It has become apparent this year that Pete and I have outgrown our current house. When we bought it we were both 9-5ers, and all it had to do was house us. Now it’s a home office as well, and we’re desperately short on space and buried under clutter.

We also seem to have outgrown Oxfordshire. We find life here rather tedious, with its traditional views and lack of decent restaurants (and yes, I have been to Le Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons). Our ties here are gone. We are no longer employed in the area; friends have moved away.

And so we are contemplating moving, but only have vague ideas where to move to. We would like somewhere where the people are friendly and progressive, where we can afford a larger house with a bigger garden, and where there are cool things to see and do. But the main requirement is a decent broadband speed.

So far we have considered:

• Brighton. Home of everything alternative, but probably pricey and the wrong side of London really. And we went there once and didn’t love it.


• Cornwall. Home of the Eden Project, lots of fresh fish and some ferociously local people who don’t like incomers. But it’s beautiful, and the climate is lovely.


• Totnes. Home of the Transition Towns movement, so at the cutting edge of progressive. All kinds of cool things going on there, but we’ve never been.


• Bristol. We went there the other day and it was sunny. A gateway to the West, probably with decent connectivity.


• Dorset/ Somerset. My mum said Dorset (my parents lived in Bridport for a few years) is full of beardy wierdies with piercings, which sounds perfect. But go too far into the countryside and the broadband cables are made of string.


• Hampshire. The wild card on the list. Everything I know about Hampshire tells me it’s too close to the Home Counties and probably pricey. But we know some lovely, superfabulous people there who are involved in all the right things.


• Wales. Added after being suggested by inw. Wet, but lovely and friendly and who could resist the home of Dr Who?

Once we can hammer out a long list, we will take some trips out to see these places and try and get a feel for what they would be like to live in. But if you have any thoughts and ideas of where we could go, then let us know! Leave a comment or send an email.

Some time ago, in a web forum far, far away, I was introduced to a nifty Amazon hack. When new titles are released, there is usually a pre-release period. During this time, orders can be placed with Amazon, they order the pre-orders from the publisher in one go, and your goodies are dispatched on day of release (or sometimes sooner).

In addition, each item on Amazon has a sales rank. That is, the position in the sales charts. This is worked out for overall sales (like, #34,012 in all books) and in categories (#430 in Apple Macintosh books, for instance) where listed. As with many things on the Internets, these figures are exploitable. Here’s how…

Pre-sales count towards the sales rank. I know this because the sales rank for The Alternative Kitchen Garden: an A to Z, Emma’s latest opus, are bouncing all over the place, and fleetingly reached as high as #9,700 or so – which is pretty good considering it’s not even out yet.

Now, books have far more visibility when they’re in the charts. Many people troll through the book charts for inspiration when buying books, and having a listing there gets more primetime sales.

So, on the grounds that pre-ordering a book increases the sales rank, this increases the visibility. And as the book isn’t out yet, canceling before the order is processed/fulfilled won’t cost you any money. It makes the item rise higher in the charts, and those buyers who aren’t aware of the book will be made aware of it when they browse the charts. Items ordered and then cancelled a few days before release won’t incur any charges, and still count as sales.

By my calculations, to get listed in the top 100 gardening books on Amazon, there needs to be a sales rank in the #8,000 block – and the lower the sales rank number, the higher the position in the charts, and the higher the sales.

Here’s where you come in: I’d love it if you could pre-order the book. If you want to cancel before it’s processed/despatched, then that’s totally fine – if you want to keep it and go through with the order, we’ll sort you out with a limited edition personalized book plate for your troubles – just let us know when you get the book and see you right.

This, in turn, will make us Oprah-rich in a years time and you’ll all be invited to a party on our new yacht. Or something.

Guerilla marketing 101. And so it begins.

This house isn’t big enough for the both of us, at least not in the capacity of living and working in the same place. Quite how we’ve managed this long without going postal at each other is sometimes beyond me.

We moved in back in mid-2001, having previously rented a small flat elsewhere in the town. Back when we moved in, in 2001, we were working at a local software company and spent most of the daytimes at work. Having pooled together our money, we got a house that we could live in without too much effort. The space we had available was OK – we had room for sleeping, eating, laundry, storing piles of stuff and things – we did alright, thankyouverymuch. We bought back before the last big housing boom/bust kicked off, so we got it for a reasonable price. Back then, in 2001, we were fixed up proper.

When the employment situation changed (I quit, she was pushed), we spent far more time at home and – ultimately – run our business from here. The room that was the living room is an office, the adjoining dining room is an extension to the office, the second bedroom is where the telly lives (though we still haven’t wired the antenna in, so it only plays discs and silly Wii stuff) and the myriad books that don’t live in the office. The third bedroom, formerly my tech hellpit office is a stuff storage area. More business stuff that doesn’t live in the office, 12” vinyl and things like that. The kitchen is still the kitchen, though sometimes I do wonder.

Fast-forward to 2009 and we’ve come to the conclusion that it’s time to find somewhere else. As the nerdy pair that we are, we’ve called the place we currently live House One. The next gaff will be House Two, and the one after House Three, and so on. I don’t know how many of you reading are likely to have version control on your domiciles, but I suspect it’s very few.

The next house we’re looking at (henceforth House Two) is set for about three or so years away. Plans this far ahead are both exciting and scary, I much prefer to work in timescales of weeks or months at a push. I’ve set myself a target of being mortgage-free by the time I’m 34, which will be during 2012. Without going into gory details of how much we owe on the mortgage, I am confident we can clear it out completely in that time.

House Two is likely to be an already-built house with more room for the office and us living there. It’s likely to be in the UK, though that’s not a given (especially with the current administration and their inability to do anything right). Beyond that, I don’t know what it will involve. Oh, fat broadband. That’s a requirement. Once you get 18mbps down and 2mbps up, you never go back.

I haven’t measured the floor space in this house, suffice it to say that it’s an end terrace house on a former council-run estate in jolly old Abingdon. We’re less enamored with Oxford and the surrounding area every time we venture out. The neighbors and locals, with a few exceptions, aren’t really the kind of people we gel with, and so it’s time to move on. Somewhere more progressive would be nice.

House Three, however, will be a custom- or self-build to our own design. It’ll be fabulous, and will more than likely have a fireman’s pole and secret underground lair. Seriously.

The reason for this post is two-fold. One, I’ve got a great software package called Home Design Studio Pro from Punch. The name gives the game away, really – it’s a great package for throwing ideas into without the architects fees. It’s fun to play with, can be used seriously and is great for building huuuuuge staircases at wonky angles. Expect images of House Three designs soon, creativity permitting.

The other thing I wanted to mention is the Emma and Pete Mortgage-O-Meter™. Seeing as Neil and Jen are doing it on their moving to Spain site, I figured I might pinch the idea. So I did, and it’s in the sidebar. When that meter hits 100%, we have the money to clear the mortgage and get out of Dodge. And by Dodge, I mean Abingdon.

The Sopranos is one of my favorite shows of recent years. I missed it the first time when it was broadcast, purely on the grounds that I only found it mid-way through one of the later series and figured there was so much catching up to do that it wasn’t worth starting in the middle of a plot/story without knowing what the heck was going on.

I rented a few of the DVDs from series one from LoveFilm without giving it much thought, and after watching the pilot I was hooked. I wanted to watch the whole set from start to finish. And watch it again. And again. Renting from postal DVD services like LoveFilm is all well and good for one-shot stuff (movies) and short TV series, but renting sprawling multi-series epics like The Sopranos create some problems:

• each show is nearly an hour long, so there’re only two or three per disc
• the turnaround at the rental HQ can be a day or two, so there’s a gap between episodes – a real bummer when there are complex story arcs going on
• it’s the TV equivalent of a page turner – you must watch the next episode to see what happens to a given character
• you’re reliant on the rental firm sending series DVDs in order, something that doesn’t always happen and/or can cause delays

Clearly when the show was initially broadcast on the goggle box these niggles were moot points – the viewer had to wait until the next week to watch the next installment. With renting out of the question, it came down to getting hold of the series in another fashion. The options (in no particular order):

• download them (legally)
• download them (illegally)
• buy physical copies (legally)
• borrow box set from someone, make an illegal copy

Ideally, I’d download the series. I will admit to downloading TV series shows from the internet via BitTorrent sites. I will also admit to invariably buying the end product retail-style when it does come out, be it a physical copy from Amazon or a thumping big DRM’d file from iTunes or whatever.

I prefer downloads because they take up less shelf space. I can live with DRM’d stuff from iTunes, and I’m happy with video in whacky formats – as long as I can play it on something or convert it to a format I can play more readily, everything’s gravy.

DVD boxsets are made of plastic, inks, card, cellophane, glue, all of which require raw materials to manufacture. Plus, the manufacturing process uses more resources. And the end product needs shipping to stores, and in Amazon’s case, further shipping to the punter. As a light-medium greenie I would really rather the oil stayed in the ground or was used for something more important than my telly watching. Downloads get another +1, the power involved with getting a bunch of files to me over the Internets is far, far lower than a boxed product.

The flaw in this logic comes down to illogical pricing. It’s significantly cheaper for me to buy physical products than legal iTunes Store downloads.

If I want to buy all seven Sopranos series (series 6 is two parts, so let’s call it seven series for the sake of argument) on iTunes, I can. It’ll be downloaded to my computer and I can watch them almost immediately. All seven series are available on iTunes:

If I buy all of them at series-level from iTunes, it will cost me 158.95GBP (that’s 260USD right now). If I’m a bit bonkers and buy each individual episode at 1.89GBP (3USD) each, all 86 of them, that’ll cost me 162.54GBP (265USD) and I’ll get RSI into the bargain.

If I buy the mega boxset from Amazon it’s 90GBP plus change (150USD):

Excluding home delivery, I’m looking at a 70-odd percent premium to get a version that involves less physical stuff. Less resources, for a lot more money. This is so backward and illogical that it’s not even funny.

If there were a few percent in it, I’d happily buy the virtual version and save the shelf space and raw materials. I’d certainly buy the iTunes version if it were cheaper than the physical version.

This whole thing came to light when I picked up The West Wing on DVD boxset. There was even more of a disparity between the two versions. Same process as before, check the iTunes Store price, check the Amazon boxset price:

Buy every series and it’ll cost 192.93GBP (315USD, give or take). The buy-individually-and-get-RSI option will set you back 294.84GBP (480USD). Ouch. Let’s see what Amazon are doing the physical West Wing boxset product for:

Yes, that’s not a typo: it’s 49.98GBP (~80USD). The downloadable version is nearly four times the price of the physical resource-intensive product. Madness.

I added the West Wing boxset to my Amazon wishlist some time ago, it was hovering around the 90GBP (~145USD) mark for months and months. I knew it would come down in price, these things invariably do over time. 50GBP was the trigger price for me, as soon as it got below that price, I would buy. A bit like reverse eBay, really.

The reality of it is that I got a cheap boxset that I will likely rip into something more palatable and leave on a shelf to gather dust. The depressing part of this whole process is that if I’ve had access to the downloadable versions without a near-300% premium, I’d have more shelf space and a lower carbon footprint.

Any or all of these things would make things better:

• Cheaper prices on iTunes Store for series-level purchases
• Much cheaper prices on iTunes Store for the purchase of an entire collection (like a box set)
• Some uniformity between the hard/soft copy prices

If the retailers and studios embraced online delivery more readily and were prepared to lower the prices, piracy would be less prevalent. The outlay involved with manufacturing the box sets would be lower, and more effort could be put into making a pristine downloadable copy that could be controlled with sensible DRM.

As it stands right now, it’s far cheaper for me to buy a real DVD, rip it and have non-DRM’d files to watch (which can get into the wrong hands, hands that haven’t paid) than it is to buy a regulated, DRM’d from an authorized source.

And remember the fourth option from the initial list of choices – borrowing the box set from someone – now you know I’ve got the box set, you’re might be inclined to ask if you can borrow it from me, and I’m powerless to stop you ripping your own copy.

Can you find a bigger price/percentage difference between an Amazon box set and an iTunes Store download? Game on…

I’ve been awake for >24hr now, I managed the all-nighter without creeping off to nap. Full body reboot is imminent, I think. I’m very tired, and yet I had an oddly lucid morning. Seeing the sun come up and hearing the dawn chorus from the beginning was worthwhile.

I’m desperately trying to keep nap urges at bay, this is positively my last bit of typing today. Typing accurately is hard, I have to re-write some words 5 or 6 times to get them right.

Now, however, I have fuel in the shape of fish fingers (fish sticks) and sweetcorn, then we’re off out to feed bread to ducks, then I daresay I’ll collapse and sleep ‘til October.