The BBC have finally released their updated homepage, after months of Beta. It’s very Web 2.0 with curvy edges, pastel colours and viewer customisation. When I first saw it, I wasn’t impressed. I couldn’t really put my finger on what it was exactly, but the colours weren’t right and it just didn’t do it for me. The only bit I felt was of any use was the clock in the corner - which is very cool, by the way.

Another tech dilemma: I want to make more Sidepodcast Diary episodes. They are designed to be quick and easy to produce with minimal effects. The very essence of the Diary is that it’s just an upload to YouTube and that’s it. No RSS feed, no fuss, it’s a snapshot of life behind the scenes at Sidepodcast. I have been using a little camera, now I’ve been using my mobile and the quality is acceptable if not great. I import the raw footage and edit it in Adobe Premiere Elements.

Twitter appeals to the short-form writer in me. I used to run a site called 101 Words, which essentially a short post every day about random stuff, but that was crucially 101 words long. Exactly. It became quite an art to fit all your thoughts for the day into 101 words. Twitter is the same kind of thing. There’s something about having a short space to get your message across that makes it a much easier place to share things. You don’t feel like you have to explain things, because let’s face it, you couldn’t even if you wanted to. There’s no room to go into detail, people are either going to get it or they’re not.

So, there he is, with his Peugeot Le Mans team buddies. Is it just me or is the goatee not necessarily the best look he’s ever had? He also looks a bit manic, what with the sticky up hair and the slightly menacing glare. Nevertheless, he’s in the team and that’s all that matters.

Peugeot are running three cars at this year’s Le Mans race, meaning a hoarde of drivers signing up to sit behind the wheel. Christian Klien and Alex Wurz are other Formula 1 drivers getting involved, but of course the most important is Franck Montagny. The Peugeot 908 is a diesel powered car with the maximum size engine allowed. Last year, two of them ran, one of which qualified ahead of nearest rivals Audi, but finished behind them. The other retired from the race.

First the iPlayer, and now iTunes. Finally, the BBC have allowed their programmes to be on the iTunes store. It’s only a select few at the moment, and only one that I’m particularly interested in, but this is a revolutionary moment. I understand that there are limitations and conflicts with the BBC’s charter – they can’t charge us for content when we pay our licence fee, can they? But I believe buying from iTunes is no different to buying a DVD and there are hundreds of BBC DVD titles to choose from.

Well, that may be an exaggeration, but the former Formula 1 driver has been saying some nice things about our favourite Frenchman. It also looks like there’s no shortage of talented drivers staying in and coming into Champ Car. The Sebring test demonstrated something I’ve known for a long time – that Franck Montagny is every bit as quick as his test times suggest. He deserves a competitive ride this year.

The news doing the rounds at the moment is that IRL and Champ Car are getting back together. I can’t pretend to understand this fully, because I’m a newbie, but I get the idea. The two used to be part of the same series but split apart a while back. Going their separate ways obviously hasn’t done them any favours, I imagine the division of fans, audience, and sponsors, isn’t exactly what they wanted. Maybe they thought people would stay tuned to both, but I’m guessing that most people have a favourite.

Is it just me or does the official Champ Car website leave a lot to be desired? Half of it is out of date - the driver bios only go up to 2005. Which is now three years ago. At least the event schedule and the news is up to date. But there should be more video and pictures available. Although, compared to the official F1 site, it’s a dream.

On the first day of testing for Forsythe Pettit/Racing, Mr Montagny topped the timesheets. I’m told this is not his first time in a Champ Car, but that’s still pretty impressive. The top five of Day 1: Pos Driver Team Time Speed 1 Franck Montagny Forsythe Pettit/Racing 50.788 seconds 118.304 mph 2 Oriol Servia PKV Racing 50.856 seconds 118.145 mph 3 Justin Wilson Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing 50.927 seconds 117.981 mph 4 Franck Perera Conquest Racing 50.986 seconds 117.844 mph 5 Alex Figge Pacific Coast Motorsports 51.097 seconds 117.588 mph On day two:

Hello everyone, welcome to the I <3 Franck blog. The mean old man over at Sidepodcast won’t let me talk about Champ Car (even though they have sidepods too!), so I’ve created this blog to worship at the feet of my new favourite CC driver: Franck Montagny. I say my new favourite CC driver as if I had one before, but quite honestly, I know absolutely nothing about Champ Car. I watched a programme about it once, where Katherine Legge was trying to get a race seat, but I think it was an old show from about 2005 or something like that.

Ever since I saw Live Writer, I knew that Microsoft had it in them to be good. They know what they’re doing when it comes to marketing to the masses but for us geeky individuals, they leave a lot to be desired. Live Writer has the essence of greatness, in that everything you need to blog to many different platforms is all in one place and it is unbelievably easy to use. My only problem is that Wordpress screws up the metadata for each image you upload, which means you have to go into the Admin screens anyway, so you might as well just right it in there. Ultimately, that’s a problem with Wordpress though, and not Livewriter.

I posted recently about the brilliance of the iPlayer and how it had revolutionised my television viewing experience. Well. I take it back. After booting up my laptop today, I opened the iPlayer Download Manager only to find a message suggesting I did not have anything to watch. Except that is a blatant lie, because I have been quite happily downloading things for the past few weeks. I’ve been storing up some episodes of things so I can watch them all together. To find they have all gone is not exactly what I was hoping for.

The thing is, I didn’t set up my Facebook account, it started out as a promotional tool for Sidepodcast. It still is that, but now I have started to take more of an interest in the whole social networking thing. I logged in and today, of all days, it wished me a Happy Birthday. Because as it wasn’t specifically about me when it was set up, the account’s birthday was defaulting to Jan 1st.

Sidepodcast has a brand new Wordpress theme, introduced for the New Year, and I wrote it. I can’t claim 100% of the credit, but a lot of the fundamental CSS work was mine. There were just a few twiddly, fiddly bits that I needed a hand with. I couldn’t find a theme that suited me so I decided to write my own. You have to start by picking a layout that you like, regardless of colours or images. I didn’t do this, and started with the default Kubrick theme - which made my life that tiny bit harder.

Picture the scene: You enter a bustling Apple store, full of giggling teenage girls snapping pictures of themselves and uploading them to Bebo. Everyone is there buying gadgets with their Christmas money and planning what they’ll get in the January sales. You are buying some software, which you have had to ask an assistant to fetch from the back of the store. You are waiting by the Genius Bar. A woman approaches a Genius and the following conversation ensues:

In the good old days, I used to enjoy television at Christmas. Actually, let’s rephrase that, I used to enjoy television full stop. My dad has always been one for guessing plot lines before they happen, working out the twists, the jokes, even the next words out of an actor’s mouth. It was quite annoying, but I guess if you can see these things, you want to share them. Since we started podcasting, specifically video podcasting, we have been studying television programmes and production in general to see what we do that’s the same, what we don’t want to be doing, and where we need to head in the future.

My inaugural post as a somewhat techie blogger must be about the BBC iPlayer. I have been using it for about a week now and I’ve formed some initial impressions. Firstly, confusion reigned supreme. Back when the iPlayer was announced, I quite obviously checked it out. Having TV accessible via the Internet is something I am keeping a close eye on, and I have strong views about the BBC as well. Mix the two together and you could end up with the perfect cocktail. However, the original iteration of the iPlayer was a closed Beta that I couldn’t get into. The second iteration saw me unable to participate due to Vista - yet another thing I have to punch Vista in the face for.

I am back. But things will not be like they were before. Forget about all that personal stuff. It works for some people but it no longer works for me. I loved it while it lasted, but times change, and some things are more important than blogging your entire life history on the web. Here, I would imagine, there will be comments on life as a whole, society as I see it, and what it’s like to be a disciple of the Internet.

With the new look design, I wanted to give the About Me section a bit of a new flavour to it as well. I’ve spotted a lot of people writing 100 Things About Me sections. Doesn’t seem all that difficult, does it? My first job was to write down the list of numbers 1 to 100, which actually took ages. Then, I started at the beginning, with the basics. Born in? Live with? That kind of thing. I got to about 20, and stopped.

Woke Up This Morning is no more. Sorry for the abrupt disappearance and for anyone who is going to miss my ramblings. This is the consequence of a choice I had to make and whilst it’s hard for me to see it go, ultimately it was an easy decision. Some things are more important than blogging. I’m still around over at Sidepodcast and look for me commenting on a website near you soon.

The thing I hate about being an adult is having to be responsible about money. At the moment, I’m busy trying to save for something rather important, and it’s really, really not working. My outgoings are equalling my income and there’s nothing left over. It’s rubbish. If I didn’t have the thing to save for, I would be treading water quite nicely, but it’s just a weight on my shoulders. I’m constantly aware that I’m going to have to pay out soon, and so far, the funds aren’t quite there yet.

Since I went crazy and started downloading every podcast that I can find, the space on my hard drive has diminished somewhat scarily. It hadn’t occurred to me, until Mr C said to make sure that I hadn’t filled the drive up completely. When I checked, I was quite shocked by the small number I was faced with. The problem is, I’m a bit obsessive about the podcasting thing. If I find one I like, and it’s not a time-specific subject (like the news), then I want to download as many as I can to catch up. Why would I only want to listen to half of something?

I looked in the mirror yesterday and I suddenly realised that I look older. Not old, hopefully. I’m not worrying about wrinkles just yet. Definitely older than the last time I checked, though. How old I feel usually depends on whether I am asked for ID in the supermarket when I’m trying to buy beer. Or if that polite young salesman in the shop calls me “Madam”. It’s little things like that which really let you know where you stand in the world.

The weather has taken a turn for the worse. Even though we occasionally get a sunny day and it’s lovely, you can tell that it is no longer summer. At some point this week, I was woken up by my alarm and it was still dull and pretty dark outside. How depressing. When it does get lighter, it’s not that bright and glorious summer sunshine, it’s a grey morning turning into a grey afternoon.

Hello. My name’s Christine and I’m a chocoholic. Well, a recovering chocoholic, anyway. I’ve been on the wagon for a whole week now, and it seems like forever. I didn’t know I was a chocoholic, I didn’t know I had a problem until I tried to quit. It happened because I was hungry and ate a Twix for lunch. Then I looked at the nutritional information (or un-nutritional information for a Twix) and noted the calories. Later, at the gym, I realised just how long it takes me to burn off the calories consumed.

A few years ago, my friend and I would spend a lot of time watching University Challenge. We would shout out all kinds of crazy answers, the first things that came into our heads, and very occasionally, we’d get the answer right. We would count up our scores and be chuffed if we got five between us out of a half hour programme of questions. You see, the thing with this quiz show, is that the questions are so complicated, that I’ve usually forgotten the beginning by the time they get to the end. And it’s very rare that I actually know the answer to a question.

I’ve always wanted to go to Brownsea Island. Islands fascinate me. The idea of being totally cut off from the rest of the world, surrounded by water and completely peaceful. Brownsea Island is owned by the National Trust and is basically a nature walk that spans the length of the island - about one and a half miles. It’s famous for being home to red squirrels, a species that is pretty much extinct except for those on the island.

As I was driving to work this morning, I drove over an object in the road. As it slipped under the car and out of view, I noticed that it was a saw. You know, like a carpenter would use. Thankfully, it was in the middle of the road, between the wheels and couldn’t do any damage. But how did it get there? Has someone got to their destination, unpacked their toolbox and sworn at the lack of saw they find there? Or was someone so unimpressed by the saw’s cutting ability that they threw it out of a moving vehicle? Or did someone on foot place it there maliciously, and then hide out in the hedgerows to giggle and laugh at any mayhem it caused.

We’ve managed to come into possession of a Nintendo DS Lite, and we cannot stop playing it. Or maybe that should read “I” cannot stop playing it. We fight over it like people fight custody battles. “I want to take it to work today.” “You won’t have time to play it.” “Lunchtime.” “I want it. Give it to me.” “It’s half mine.” “It’s half mine.” There’s no easy answer and we’re just going to have to draw up a schedule to share it. Those silly Super Mario Bros. have a lot to answer for.

I don’t know if I mentioned it, but I sent a script off to the BBC. BBC Writersroom encourages unsolicited scripts, and they’ll get read and examined for scriptwriting talent. I got my script back yesterday, just over two months since I sent it in, and obviously, they didn’t like it. Big shock. It’s only the second story I’ve ever finished, and the first script I’ve ever written, so I’m surprised I had the audacity to send it in, really.

I got home last night and an enormous silver ball came flying out of the main room into the hallway. Thankfully, I had moved out of the way from my usual “removing shoes” position, and the ball missed me. For a second, I thought I was unknowingly in a remake of The Prisoner. Turns out it was just a gym ball. Has anyone tried to use one of these? I never realised how bad my balance actually is.

My list of unheard podcasts gets smaller and smaller until I find some brand new exciting ones that I want to listen to in their entirety. The time I spend at my laptop means I am being more productive and crossing things off my To-Do list as well. But it means other things are stacking up. I have still barely made a dent on my stack of books from the humongous Amazon order we made a few months ago. At least books don’t keep updating and getting bigger when you’re not looking. Like programs and podcasts do.

Hello. Are you all still there? I’m back. But only just. Last night, I was pulling a plug out of a 4-way socket and the whole thing exploded, sending me cowering to the other side of the room. On closer investigation, it turns out the 4-way had actually broken inside, in such a way that the experienced electrical type guy that I live with had never seen before. Could have been a lot more painful, if some kind soul hadn’t invented the trip switch.

Well, that’s it. It’s over and I did it. It was certainly an experience although not at all what I was expecting. It was fun looking at what other people were doing and finding a couple of blogs that I’ll be reading in the future. I managed to stay awake until about 6am, which is very impressive for me, and then I napped in between blogging which didn’t make me feel too hot.

I wanted to be a teacher because I had a really good primary school teacher and I wanted to be just like her. I wanted to be a firefighter, because it seemed like a very exciting and noble thing to do. I wanted to be a housewife because I like to cook and keep house. I wanted to be happy because doesn’t everyone? Although I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, I know that I am happy and that is a good start.

I’ve already mentioned my desire to buy a house and make it solar powered and very eco-friendly. It’ll be tough to do that in this country, given the lack of adequate space, and the cost of the space once you find it. The best bet is to move somewhere else, like France. But I want to get a nice big plot of land with plenty of space to sort out a vegetable garden and the usual compost and green features that you would expect. This does not come cheap. Nor does having the time look after chickens and vegetables.

Recently, I realised that my podcast collection was a bit… lacking. I liked what I had but there wasn’t all that much diversity. I was looking forward to finding out some new shows. Thankfully, with 24 hours to fill, I managed to find out some new podcasts, download them all and pretty much get up to date. Actually, that’s not true, there are still a lot that I haven’t got round to, but I’m much happier that my list is overflowing with gems.

It’s almost 12 o’clock and we’ve just had lunch. A little bit early, but given the complete mess-up of timings, it doesn’t really matter, does it? I couldn’t really eat too much during the actual marathon event and the staying up throughout the night, because when I eat, I fall asleep. I’m sure there’s a biological explanation behind it, but actually, it’s quite annoying. When I get home from work on a normal weekday, I make us dinner, and after that, I’m lucky if I don’t fall asleep.

I think there was a programme on the BBC called It’s Not Easy Being Green. I didn’t watch it but I am currently reading the book, and it’s brilliant. It’s all about a family who gave up their home and moved to Cornwall, to set up a much more eco-friendly life. They didn’t give themselves up to the land or anything, and are still normal people with jobs and lives, but they are “reducing their eco-footprint on the world”.

We went to a firework display recently. As is our way, we arrived late to the display, but nothing had started yet. We found an empty spot, climbed a fence, got a good view, set up the camera, and were ready to go. The countdown began. 3, 2, 1… Whoosh. The first fireworks went up. We tried to get some pictures, but nothing really worked. The lenses weren’t really capable of what we wanted from them given the dark, and the exposure time and things like that.

A long time ago, I walked past an art shop and saw the best painting I’ve ever spotted. It was a deserted beach, somehow done in purple, with two lonely figures walking along together. So, actually, they probably weren’t so lonely. And I suppose the beach wasn’t so deserted. Bad description. The price tag was out of reach at the time, and although still a stretch, a couple of years on I could probably scrape together the funds to buy something I really loved. Naturally, now that is the case, the picture is nowhere to be seen.

A while ago I was reading a blog that said they were going to ‘announce’ that they had decided to hold off on the having a kid thing. It struck me as weird when I first read it, that there was some kind of an announcement ceremony that went with this, in the same way there would be if there was an actual pregnancy. But the more I think about it, the more it makes sense. I definitely do not want kids, and I haven’t announced it to anyone, but I haven’t had to. I’ve not made any secret of the fact that I would rather rip my own ears off than bring someone else into the world. People that do are great, it’s a choice and I’m choosing not to.

I am always correcting people. When they talk to me and pronounce a word wrong, I can’t help but correct them. When I am reading something they have written, and something is spelt wrong, I have to mention it. I suppose it is not a bad thing to like correct spelling and punctuation, but it often gets on people’s nerves. Nobody likes to be picked up on something they’ve spelled wrong.

I think I see the world differently to how normal people see it. When Mr C and I talk about something complex, like politics, I don’t always understand all of the things he is telling me. The answer always seems so simple. Why don’t they just give the prisoners back? That kind of thing. But even when the complications are explained to me, I am still adamant that there is a simple and peaceful solution.

I often go along with what the people around me are saying. It’s not necessarily that I agree with them or that I don’t, I just prefer to go along with them. It’s not that I am being influenced by them or even being ‘under the thumb’ about a particular subject. It’s just the way I am. My biggest problem is probably also my greatest asset. I can see arguments from both sides. Pretty much always. Unless something has actually hurt me, then I can be pretty unbiased about things, so much so, it infuriates other people.

Mr C always says it takes a lot to impress me. Quite often I come home to find he has discovered some new gadget or some piece of news or something that is just so important and he is really excited about it. All too often, I am less bothered about it. Yeah, whatever. The truth is, I don’t mind reading about something, or hearing about it, but it’s not until I see it in action that it’s really going to impress me.

I mentioned somewhen at the beginning of this Blogathon, eons and eons ago, that I jumped out of my skin when I saw a snake. That’s one of the few things that scares me. I didn’t jump when a scary moment happened in LOST. I don’t tend to be bothered by horror films, and ghost trains just don’t do it for me. However, when I come home from work and expect you to shout hello and you don’t, and then I walk cautiously into the room, worried about what I might find, and you’re waiting behind the door ready to jump out on me and say boo? Then I jump.

One of my New Year’s resolutions, as documented on this site, was to try and write some transcripts. I’d had some moderate success doing a couple and wanted to see if there was any future in it for me. Volunteering for a television site, and producing a couple of transcripts a week was a really great thing for me to do. It kept me active, gave me something productive to do, helped me to think, and also gave back to the script-reading community. Everyone’s a winner.

Is everyone still having fun? A lot of people are talking about a second wind or a renaissance in their writing. I am feeling the exact opposite. I was absolutely fine to start with, had a bit of a dip after seven or so hours, because that was my usual bedtime. Then I’ve been good all through the night. It’s now 6am and I’m really starting to feel it. I’ve been having fun though. I don’t think I’ve ever written so much in my life. Mr C sure is going to have a lot to read when he wakes up.