I'm not a short story reader normally, but I've been getting more and more into the format recently. I read the original Twisted book a long time ago, and have had this sequel sitting on my bookshelf since it first came out. I adore Jeffery Deaver's writing and have read most, if not all, the Lincoln Rhyme novels. The amount of detail and knowledge about crime, the police system, forensic evidence, it boggles my mind.

Going back to the book, though, I did find it tough going. I think it was another one of those issues where I couldn't relate to this 13 year old girl who dreamed big. She was so full of thoughts about politics and the future. When I was 13 I thought about pop music and bubblegum. I feel terrible about this. Still, I did manage to read it all the way through this time, which is something to note, as I believe I have tried and failed a couple of times before.

One photo today - busy, busy, busy. 'Tis a cute one though. Credit: Ben Beard/Flickr

Not only have I just uncovered a new site covering the world of eBooks, but it is a site that is asking for contributions. Yay! Starting from the beginning, I read the Random Acts of Reality blog which is written by an ambulance technician (I'm not sure they're still called that, sincere apologies), and is a really fascinating read. The author, Tom Reynolds, also compiled a book on the same …

For some reason I feel like I should make excuses for watching this film, but hey, it's not just for kids. Who doesn't love a good bit of Pixar? Perhaps this film isn't AS much fun as it was the last time I watched it, but it's still a perfectly acceptable way to spend an hour and a half, Pixar certainly know what they're doing creating multi-level films, especially with all the little things you only notice on multiple viewings.

The Telegraph has been doing some digging into when Hulu will reach European shores and although it looks like deals are still be negotiated, progress is being made. Of course, they only have "a source" for their article but it claims that ITV are the closest to signing a deal with the online video provider and that would most likely have some exclusivity associated with it. The source says: Hulu …

Franck's official site has updated with thoughts on the race at Sonoma, and confirms what we all thought - a disappointing race but FKM still showed well. We would have loved seeing Franck repeating his last year’s success in Long Beach as he scored a strong second place for his first Champcar race. That was finally not the case this weekend but Franck still did an amazing job getting used …

At the moment, I am pretty good at dreaming up something to write about and getting it done within a few days. For a while, I went through a busy stage, where I created a lot of draft posts for this blog, with the intention of writing them up later. Some of them have come to fruition, others are just getting older and older. I had a week off last …

Boo. I can honestly say that I stayed up to watch the race, and then went to bed once Franck had to retire from the race. How disappointing. FKM had been involved in an incident on the very first lap, when the cars in front tangled together leaving little space for those behind to squeeze through unscathed. Although he was now running towards the back, miles away from his 8th …

Hello! I know I have been quiet since Franck's race seat was announced, and I should have been following his performance in testing as well as in qualifying yesterday. Apparently rookie's get a bit of extra time on track which is a really good thing to see. I saw some of qualifying yesterday, although I never really established which car was Franck on screen, and only caught the last few …

I was recently introduced to the Android App Locale and it is really rather good. I thought I would share, although if you are a Google Android user, you have likely found this already. It is basically a fancy way of storing some 'if statements' in your phone to make certain things happen. I have only set up one, but will share with you as an example: I get a …

Of course, I'm not talking about real life friends (what are they?), I'm talking about the sitcom. This is my favourite TV show ever on earth, and my real life friend (oh!) and I used to spend hours watching and memorising the episodes. I was going to make this a top five list, but then realised firstly that I couldn't narrow it down or decide which was my overall favourite. …

Another reason print is dead (to me). Once a month, F1 Racing falls through my letterbox on a Saturday morning at 8am with a massive clonk and wakes me up. PDFs do not do this.

The BBC have teamed up with online video service Blinkbox to deliver some of its TV Shows for a price, plus a few programmes for free that come with ads. It's important to point out this is BBC Worldwide, which is the commercial arm of the Beeb, and essentially completely separate from the non-advertising public service broadcaster. I have never heard of Blinkbox before, but it looks as though it …

An interesting thought about the Kindle that hadn't occurred to me. I wonder how many people have not only fallen for the sheer alleged convenience of Kindle, but because it has filled their minds with works they would not otherwise have touched. Could Kindle be a way to re-educate the world? Could it help us to bypass those scheming, artsy book designers and finally be true to our own genuine …

This is quite a cool game: Can you name the most used passwords of all time? Not a catchy title, I grant you, but it's fun all the same. You get three minutes to guess the most popular passwords. A couple of them are obvious, and I actually only got five. I am also slightly concerned as to how this data is collected. Either someone is reading and collecting passwords, …

The BBC have always been good at pushing forward new music, even as the industry changes around them. It used to be supremely hard for unsigned artists to get their music heard, but with MySpace and Podsafe music, it's easier for word to spread. Although this is better for artists, I imagine it might make the BBC's life a little harder - there is such a wealth of music out …

I have seen this once, a long while ago, and I remember very little about it. I feel like I should like it because it has Queen songs and involves transcending time which is on a par with time travel. Perhaps I don't like this film as much as I thought I did. The Queen music is awesome, obviously. But the sword fights are laboured, the accents are annoying, and it doesn't really make sense. The gathering, the quickening, the prize, it's all nonsense! Still, Queen!

A Panda Cub's Prison Break, thanks to Alex for finding this.

Eidos are taking a leaf out of Radiohead's book, and charging only a processing fee for their new game. Users are requested to pay what they think the game is worth. The Championship Manager 2010 game is available until September 10th, when the full game hits the shops and the price rises to £29.99. There's a rather snazzy video of the press conference, and Eidos say: We’re keen to see …

Over in the US, the purchase of digital music over CDs is rising. The NPD Group released some statistics suggesting that digital sales now make up 25% of the overall sale of music, and that figure is only growing. From the press release: Many people are surprised that the CD is still the dominant music delivery format, given the attention to digital music and the shrinking retail footprint for physical …

I've just discovered this really interesting page on Flickr (via The Next Web) which collates information from all its users and shows us which camera is the most popular. The iPhone has made quite the leap, and other graphs on the page, show that it is by far the most popular supplier of photos from cameraphones. All the point & shoot cameras are Canon's as well, which is just plain …

I have been watching a couple of new advertising initiatives that have really worked on me, and I am only talking about them to encourage more of the same from companies in the future (because I have that kind of power, you know?) and not because I necessarily have an opinion on the brand either way. Other [insert product here] are available. Firstly, I've been reading Mighty Girl for a …

I was actually going to record this as a kind of video blog, but am missing a rather crucial USB cable that without it means I have to crawl around under desks and dismantle Mr C's rather tidy cabling. I don't think he'd thank me for that, but I feel the stories are worth sharing before they get too old, so I'll post the transcript instead. This is also my …

Mashable posted an article a couple of days ago, with a rundown of 12 Things Newspapers Should Do to Survive. The majority of the pointers seem to reiterate the notion of not trying to fight the web, to embrace it, and to go niche to protect your brand in print. This makes perfect sense, because the best way to keep newspapers and magazines going is to ensure they provide something …

Whilst I've been getting more and more attached to my T-Mobile G1, it looks as though the Android development team are going through the opposite emotions. According to this story on Engadget, G1 users really need to make the most of their recent Cupcake software update, because it will probably be their last! Supposedly, HTC put a limited amount of internal flash space into the G1, and the Android operating …

The tomatoes did turn red in the end, and they were delicious.

Part two of a media-related post on our sister site Sidepodcast. Do some keywords fare better than others? Which headlines provided the most interest? Everything is completely transparent, it’s quick and easy to tailor things on the fly and straightforward to vary advertisements according to budget. We have, in the past, run an advertising campaign purely for the live commenting of races. At most that means running ads for a …

Part one of a media-related post on our sister site Sidepodcast. Linking makes the social, well, more sociable and without it conversation takes considerably more effort. Which is why we know print is dead. It’s been a long time coming, but social networking has finally rendered the printed page obsolete. Remaining marginally rational for a moment, it’s probably worth adding that the length of the printed material and the type …

If you work in an office it can be quite a grind, but there are loads of toys and gadgets out there to help the day go a little bit faster. Here are some of my favourite ones at the moment. The Desktop Henry Hoover is an ideal gadget because not only is it cute and a talking point, but it also cleans your desk! It takes a couple of …

Two Pandas Credit: La Rusa Loca/Flickr Baby Panda Eyes Credit: Elaine Gast/Flickr

This is singularly the best moment from Never Mind the Buzzcocks ever. In my opinion, Buzzcocks got better when Simon Amstell took over, although some of his humour was, it's fair to say, evil. Bill Bailey also made a great addition, and his weird moments could be very amusing. Bailey left and was replaced by guest captains, then Amstell left to be replaced by guest hosts. Apparently Noel Fielding and …

LibriVox is an organisation with a simple goal - to make all public domain works accessible in audiobook form. I've been involved for a long while now, part of an enormous group of volunteers who record chapters, poems and entire books to attempt to reach this goal. My latest solo book has been catalogued: Grace Harlowe's Plebe Year at High School. It's one of those books that is probably aimed …

What unbelievably good weather we had in the UK this past weekend! Mr C and I were so impressed we actually headed outside. We found our way to the river, and ended up on a boat. I didn't want to take the wheel to start with, but after a while I was desperate to take over, so I drove us up and down, whilst Mr C took some pictures and …

There has been some speculation recently that Franck would be signed up by AGR to race for them in a forthcoming IRL event, and now it has been confirmed. FKM will take to the wheel of the No. 25 on the 22-23rd of August, in his IRL debut. He says: I am certainly looking forward to my IndyCar debut in Sonoma with AFS and Andretti Green Racing. I was able …

I actually didn't discover this song until quite recently, one of those ones that I've heard plenty of times but never really knew what it was. As ever, Mr C was more than happy to educate me, and now I really, really like it. It's not so much the song that I like, but the fact that this song, and more importantly the video, creates amazing conversations. For the record, …

I mentioned the Best Job in the World previously, worrying that the successful candidate - Ben Southall - will find it difficult to top his six months in Australia. What has occured to me now is that I can't bring myself to read the blog. I subscribed to it as soon as the blog went live, because I was one of those who followed the selection process with interest. The …

Sony has announced two new ebook Readers - the Pocket and the Touch. Specs, more pictures, and a brief review available on CNET. At least this one is available in the UK. Are you listening Amazon?

Rupert Murdoch and his many, many media enterprises announced huge losses recently, and that has prompted the newspaper giant to announce that their online news presence will not be free for much longer. Murdoch says he is aware that this will cause copyright problems, and they’ll tighten up on that considerably. However, he is looking forward to cashing in on the celebrity gossip hunters who visit such sites as The …

Recently, we were enjoying a relaxing weekend and decided cooking wasn't part of the plan. On Saturday, we wanted an Indian restaurant. We didn't know where the nearest one was, so I pulled out my G1 and googled the area we were in, plus the type of restaurant we were looking for. As it turns out, we were just round the corner from one, that we had walked past several …

Here we are, then, eleven weeks on, and my gardening adventure has come to its conclusion. Most of the stuff died. The lettuce seemed to expire. I cleared out the strawberry pot, and I was left with a weird Jekyll & Hyde tomato plant. The tomatoes are at least trying to turn red now. I am not sure whether I should pull them off and ripen them, or if I …

This is my last blog entry about the safari park trip, I promise. The thing is, as we were going around the park, we realised that there was one fundamental problem with the whole premise. Why are we driving? Our experience of the safari park was: turning off the main road to get to the ticket booths, queuing to buy the tickets, then driving excruciatingly slowly round the park. Thankfully, …

Okay, so yes, it's a great film. But it's a rollercoaster of emotions - infuriating, painful, funny, awkward, sad, ridiculous. It makes me uncomfortable not knowing whether I should be laughing or crying! But I did enjoy it and the two characters are really well played.

It’s no secret that Radiohead aren’t afraid to try something new with their distribution models, particularly in the scope of online delivery. Their free release of In Rainbows, where consumers were encouraged to pay what they felt it was worth, garnered them a lot of media (if not money). Now, Thom Yorke has spoken out in Believer magazine, admitting that CDs were never his favourite: There’s a process of natural …

A report out this week suggests that TV viewers in the UK are now consuming more ads than ever before. This is purely taking into account actual television viewing, and not online TV, and the stats line up something like this: 16.7 hours of commercial TV per week on average in the first half of 2009 that’s up 9.9 minutes on 2008, which isn’t a lot, but who was expecting …

This film is pretty much perfect. It has aged a little bit, but the idea of smart little kids and grumpy teenagers will never get old. It's a great mix of comedy and angst, and totally family friendly. The clown is the one bad thing, but not enough to dock it a point.

I have just found out about a new park opened in New York called the High Line. I don't ever intend on travelling to New York, but if I did I would want to go and see this. The High Line railway opened back in the 1930s, as a way to stop pedestrians getting knocked over by freight trains. The tracks ran alongside the big warehouses, allowing buildings to have …

Of course, after saying I had not experimented with the share feature on Google Reader, I went and clicked on the button and now I'm hooked. It's like bookmarking things on Delicious but so much easier! I've only been using it for about 12 hours, but already it's the best thing since the last best thing and before the next best thing. There's even a selection of my latest shared …

I was converted to Google Reader a while ago, after I decided I needed to be able to check my RSS feeds while I was out and about. Until then, I had happily used FeedDemon, which then became Net News Wire when I switched to a Mac. It didn't take long for me to be convinced that Google reading is the way to go, because: If you're on a site, …

As heard on CNET’s Buzz Out Loud, EMI are apparently backing out of deals with smaller retailers in the US, preferring to only sell to the big stores, such as Walmart and Best Buy. I don’t know why they’d stop, surely it is the same price to deliver to one store as it is to another, however, this is bad news for physical music sales. Independent CD shops tend to …