Journal

Liverpool, European City of Gun Culture 2008

Monday January 7th 2008

I think that’s catchier, and more accurate, than plain old “European City of Culture 2008”.

Mackets Lane, where that guy was shot in his car, is less than a mile away from where we live. Fortunately we’re much further away from where the 21 year old was shot in the leg. I wonder if we have to mention stuff like that in our Home Information Pack when the time comes to sell up? (And that time cant come soon enough.)

“15 year old, two bedroom, semi-detached home. Surrounding brick boundary wall gives lower floor ample protection from stray rounds. Upper floors gives unique vantage point for viewing the local morons when they blow up the nearby phone booth.”

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Journal

My Charts for 2007

Sunday January 6th 2008

Thanks to Last FM, here are my top 20 charts from the last year – in brackets are the number of listens to each artist.

  1. Foo Fighters (191)
  2. Moby (144)
  3. Red Hot Chili Peppers (134)
  4. Buckcherry (100)
  5. Linkin Park (99)
  6. Feeder (94)
  7. The Strokes (92)
  8. Jackyl (88)
  9. Placebo (84)
  10. Rage Against the Machine (81)
  11. Lynyrd Skynyrd (77)
  12. Blondie (73)
  13. The Chemical Brothers (73)
  14. Garbage (65)
  15. Snow Patrol (63)
  16. Barenaked Ladies (62)
  17. Hydrogyn (53)
  18. Massive Attack (51)
  19. Underworld (51)
  20. Paul van Dyk (49)

Earlier in the year I was actually listening to a huge amount of Red Hot Chili Peppers, but that release of the new Foo Fighters album in September had me hitting them hard in the months that followed. Then I picked up Moby’s Hotel at long last toward the end of the year and was using it to chill myself out during all of the end of year stress at work. So the Chilli’s kind of got bumped into third by the late charge from the other two.

This year I think I’m going to listen to more of my recommendations radio station, as I’ve flat out exhausted my CD collection and I’ll need to broaden my horizons a bit before I get sick of my favourites.

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Gravatars, finally.

Sunday January 6th 2008

With some time to spare yesterday I finally got round to implementing Gravatars on the site here, so that folk with a “globally recognised avatar” will see their avatar appear beside their comments.

In the event it was a piece of cake – there’s a WordPress plugin that you install, and then all that’s needed is to stick a line beside where user comments go in the comments.php file of your template.

<img src="<?php gravatar('R', 45) ?>" alt="gravatar" class="alignleft" />

I used the line of code above to insert a 45 pixel icon beside the <cite> tag in the template.

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